We’re delighted today to share an essay from Su Shin, whom we met soon after we arrived to Taiwan five years ago. We were struck by her deep passion for Taiwanese culture and books. Su is the managing director of Bookman, an independent bookstore and publisher, and of BK Agency, a literary agency promoting Taiwanese titles to international markets. She’s hosted many bilingual events at Bookman. Today she shares her own experiences working with Indigenous authors, forging connections between Austronesian artists across the Pacific, mentoring children’s book authors, and supporting government projects that nurture book culture in rural areas.

What Travels? Guest Essay from Su Shin

I returned to Taiwan in 2016 after fifteen years in England, where I lived from ages thirteen to twenty-eight. Those years left me with a strong feeling of otherness—in England and in Taiwan, and in different ways in each place. Even now I often feel like I’m positioned slightly outside many of the rooms I enter, which in turn means that I think about and observe the world in particular ways.

My interest in picture books came from an early engagement with images: manga in Taipei, comic books in Portsmouth. Later, I felt pulled toward Indigenous voices. I was drawn to work made by people writing from the margins of their own contexts. Books surrounded me as a child, and I work now for an independent publisher, bookstore, and agency that my father started.

In my personal and professional lives I think a lot about arrival: what happens when a story crosses a border, when readers encounter something the dominant culture doesn’t yet have a category for. And how do you translate sensibility alongside language?

A few weeks ago, I was talking with Michelle and Albert about the projects I’ve been involved in lately and the events I’ve attended, and they thought some of those could be of interest to their readers. So, here goes!

Austronesian Film Festival and Taitung Expo

“Austronesian” refers to the shared linguistic and cultural ancestry connecting Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples to Māori, Pacific Islanders, and peoples across Southeast Asia. The great Austronesian migration is thought to have originated in Taiwan, and these connections therefore run deep, both genealogically and culturally.

I attended the Austronesian Film Festival in Taitung on the last weekend of July. As part of its program, the festival screened Before the Moon Falls, a film about the life of Samoan writer Sia Figiel, an intensely vulnerable person who describes her own battles with mental health. I enjoyed how Before the Moon Falls showed the full range of Figiel’s real-life textures, be they good, bad, or truly ugly.

The festival invited documentary makers Kimberlee Bassford and Vilsoni Hereniko to participate alongside other speakers in a panel discussion that helped give context to Figiel’s life, Samoan traditions, contemporary issues in Samoa, and filmmaking from Indigenous perspectives. Hereniko mentioned that some of the films might not feel familiar to those expecting a linear narrative and that they can be thought of instead as circular. As viewers, we might not “get” the story immediately, but we should try to feel it in our bellies (something distinct from thinking with our brains and feeling with our hearts). Each of the films I watched that weekend was different in style and narrative structure, but collectively they created greater understanding through their investigations into health, displacement, alienation, friendship, adventure, and the shared humanity of marginalized communities.

My connection with the Taitung County Government started in 2020, when I was helping edit Ora Nui 4, a Taiwan–New Zealand special issue of the Māori journal showcasing Indigenous literature, visual arts, and cultural studies. After that, the Taitung County Cultural Affairs Department began inviting me to their Austronesian cultural policy conferences. They use open-space-technology formats: circular discussion groups organized by theme, where attendees can move between conversations and think collectively. These were unlike any other conferences I had attended, and I was impressed by a sense of community that had clearly been built over time.

Taitung’s focus on developing Austronesian culture began in 1999, when the Council for Cultural Affairs (文建會), precursor to the Ministry of Culture, observed that Taitung has the highest proportion of Indigenous people in Taiwan. While other counties were allocated their own cultural focus—stone-carving in Hualien, wood-carving in Miaoli—Taitung was given Austronesian culture. The approach was modest (consisting of annual presentations, mostly), and funding eventually ended in 2016. In 2023, however, the county restarted this cultural mission with impressive results. This August, Taitung is holding its first official Expo, with programming that includes circus performances and light installations held alongside exhibitions at the county’s museums and galleries. A major extension to the Taitung public library was completed this April, and during the Expo it has hosted events, exhibitions, and craft markets.

In my observations of Taiwan’s conversations across the Pacific, I’ve seen how cultural policies are moving beyond “preservation,” which risks producing misunderstandings and stereotypes. Instead, they’re becoming truly collaborative with durable knowledge-sharing partnerships.

Syaman Rapongan and Eyes of the Sky

Syaman Rapongan of the Tao people of Orchid Island is one of Taiwan’s most widely read and translated Indigenous writers. Much of Tao tradition revolves around the ocean: the annual Flying Fish Festival in particular is central to their life and worldview. For the Tao, the ocean is an epistemology, a distinctive way of organizing knowledge. The Tao are only one of the seventeen officially recognized Indigenous peoples in Taiwan living on an offshore island, and their closest linguistic and cultural relatives are to the south, in the Batanes, not across the channel.

Here’s an example of Syaman’s writing, a section of Eyes of the Sky, taken from the Willowherb Review (tr. Tim Smith), an online nature writing journal founded by writer and academic Jessica J. Lee:

The ocean is a starry sky, and the starry sky is an ocean. It has been this way ever since Hundun, when time was a muddy swirl. The water is a world of all life and all mythologies, and it is a world in which my family has evolved for many thousands of years. My kind does not interest marine biologists, but this is no bad thing; ultimately, there can be no mystery following the disclosure of one’s secrets.

When I was little, I heard from my great-grandfather that the ancestors of the ancestors of the Tao people told a story. Now, a so-called civilized person like you needn’t question how it is that I, a fish, am telling this story. It is enough for me to say that you need not be cynical, need not sit in front of a computer or a television all day all year long and thereby presume to know everything there is to know about the world.

I enjoy the immersive feeling of reading Syaman, of being taken into and under the sea and then returning to land and everyday life. I’ve been handling his foreign rights for around two and a half years. We first met nearly ten years ago at the Bangkok Book Fair, where he was a guest speaker for the Taiwan Pavilion, and later reconnected when I was working on Ora Nui 4. What struck me then and still strikes me is a clarity about why he writes. In addition to documenting the lives of Tao people, Syaman is explicitly anti-colonial. He speaks as someone belonging to one of Taiwan’s most marginalized groups. The Tao carry generations of harm inflicted by, among other things, Christian missionaries, Japanese colonial administrations, and the postwar state. Even as much of the rest of Taiwan has grown wealthy, poverty persists on Orchid Island.

At book fairs, those who show interest in Syaman’s works are for the most part editors and publishers who hold a genuine desire to publish unique perspectives. His books have been translated into French, English, and other languages. Most recently, Eyes of the Ocean, translated by Darryl Sterk, and Eyes of the Sky, translated by Kyle Shernuk, were published by Columbia University Press in 2025 and 2026, respectively. Domestically, his works are featured as well in school textbooks, and he won the prestigious National Arts Award in 2023. He’s also been invited to speak about his writing and has been building a larger readership. Promoting works of such artistic and cultural significance does not always align with market success, but the work in finding readers is deeply rewarding.

Liyan Books, Etan Pavavalung, & Pei-hsiu Chen

Liyan Books is a publishing house producing bilingual picture books for readers aged six to twelve. It is distinguished by the audio recordings that accompany many of its titles. The multilingual recordings—presented in Hokkien, Hakka, or Indigenous languages, depending on the book—are transmission tools, delivering languages underrepresented in mainstream publishing into the ears of young readers.

The company was founded in 2009 by Wang Ching-long (王清龍), who brought together Taiwan-based writers, illustrators, scholars, and cultural historians to collaborate on picture books depicting Taiwan’s landscapes and histories. Wang developed a familiarity with library and other sales channels during his early career at Taiwan’s FMP magazine (台灣英文雜誌), a distributor of U.S. magazines including Life and Reader’s Digest. Later, when he founded Liyan Books, he learned the strategic importance of external resources and institutional partnerships and, instead of funding all projects without support, began pursuing government tenders and collaborating with foundations and institutions. Consequently, many of Liyan’s projects are the result of partnerships with the Taoyuan Department of Cultural Affairs. This pragmatic approach was helpful in sustaining a medium-term publishing plan, which meant marketing to schools through in-classroom reading sessions to reach a wider readership. Teachers gave positive feedback, saying that the subjects discussed were closer to the students’ everyday lives than those found in the international and domestic canon that they were used to reading.

The Old Street Creek, illustrated by Pei-hsiu Chen (陳沛珛), was forged in partnership with the Taoyuan Department of Cultural Affairs. It tells the history of a waterway in Taoyuan that was a hub for commerce and trade as well as a space where people gathered. In the time between then and now, industrial development transformed the creek’s landscape and ecology, polluting its waters and disrupting the communities that had formed around it.

A grandfather retells this history to his grandchild, describing the ongoing efforts to rehabilitate and restore the creek. The book was selected by Munich’s International Youth Library and featured in the Down by the River exhibition running from February to August 2026. Liyan didn’t submit it to any competitions, yet the Munich library somehow found it—suggesting that unexpected border crossings can happen to books anywhere, leading them on wonderful journeys.

Etan Pavavalung (伊誕．巴瓦瓦隆), a prominent Paiwan artist, has published three books with Liyan. My favorite is The Formosan Wild Boar. It’s a story about a family of wild boar being forced deeper into the forest as land disruption shrinks their habitat. The plot sounds simple, but the art elevates the work. Pavavalung uses his distinctive technique of carved lines and patterns (紋砌刻畫) to produce rich, earthy images whose grooved wood has a tactility that is essential to the book’s success.

Ministry of Culture Incentives and Emerging Picture Book Makers

Over the past few years, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture (MOC) has built an ecosystem for picture book makers through several initiatives: the Golden Picture Book Award (金繪獎), the New Talent Showcase Prize (繪本新秀獎), and various picture book lectures and workshops (繪本和圖文書學校). These institutional structures matter for everyone in the industry, but they nevertheless remain hotly debated. Genuine disagreement exists: what counts as excellence, how international visibility should be measured, and whether it’s fair to award significant prizes to emerging talent when established authors and artists have worked for years without comparable recognition. These and many other questions don’t have clean answers, but the fact that the publishing community is grappling with the role of the government reflects the fact that something is being built.

I’ve served as a panel judge for the first two rounds of the New Talent Showcase Prize. In July, my colleagues and I joined experienced picture book editor Yang-tong Zhou to mentor a handful of picture book prize winners. In these monthly mentoring sessions, we asked the creators to describe their conceptual approaches and inspirations. Our perspective is from the agency side, so we thought about how these works might find foreign rights buyers and travel internationally. We shared how they might bolster their pitches by adding warmth and a personal touch.

The stories ranged widely. Some explored perception and freedom, while others examined war through a child’s immediate sensory experience. One book, for instance, focused on what food was available rather than on a grand narrative or an omnipresent fear. Another picture book creator explored mother-child relationships and everyday difficulties at school. The illustration styles were equally diverse, ranging from free-style illustrations to life-like drawings. I’ve heard many international publishers comment on the broad range of styles they see in Taiwan picture books, and I’m not sure where this comes from (as in, what tradition, or lack thereof), but it’s something I notice constantly: artists here feel open and able to create their own styles.

What struck me in the discussion was how much craft matters at this stage. We talked about the strategic power of a cover, how a too-gentle cover can make parents underestimate a picture book’s thematic depth. We discussed how to use spreads strategically: close angles against wide shots. We talked about rhythm in visual storytelling and how to pace in a way that works with rather than against the narrative arc. These things are technical choices that can distinguish a picture book. By the time we joined the mentoring session, the group had already worked through several rounds of feedback, and I could only recognize two books from their original conceptions. That gap between what a picture-book maker first produces and what emerges after editorial guidance tells you how much transformation happens, and being able to accept this process of collaborative mutation is a crucial part of any picture-book maker’s journey.

I came back to Taiwan after being away fifteen years. That distance taught me how to see the ways that stories and images travel across borders and cultures.

The work I’ve described in this piece is not finished. Syaman’s readership is still finding itself. Liyan’s titles are listed on certain American platforms and distributed through mainstream channels in Taiwan, but they are far from widely known. The picture book ecosystem being built through MOC funding is genuinely alive and genuinely contested, which, I’ve come to think, is what vitality looks like, especially from within. (I guess settled things don’t get argued about in that way.)

Books travel, not always quickly, and not always in the form their makers first imagined. An Austronesian connection brought Māori and Taiwanese Indigenous writers into the same pages of a literary journal. A Tao writer’s ocean literature finds readers in an international nature magazine. A picture book about a Taiwanese creek is recognized in Germany. These might not be watershed moments, but there’s something there. It’s an opening, however small.

I can’t say this work will resolve cleanly, or that every reader and book will find each other in time. But there’s a joy I’ve come to rely on: seeing possibilities I didn’t know existed, expansions of what I thought the limits were. When that happens, even once, it’s enough to keep going.

A life-affirming youth gathering at the Taiwanese American Foundation

Michelle here. I was part of an inaugural artist residency, the brainchild of Leona Chen, at the Taiwanese American Foundation (TAF), a week-long summer camp at Manchester University in northern Indiana. It gathered 300+ youth (ages 6 to 18), 100+ counselors, and 100+ parents. TAF has nurtured community in the Midwest across three generations for 46 years. Leona’s idea was to gather five writers at this camp, pamper us, offer free childcare (!), and give us time to write.

Within my first hour stepping foot on campus, a counselor told me, “This is where I learned I’m Taiwanese.” Another told me this is where he learned about 2-28—he was ten years old at the time. (2-28 is a reference to a massacre of tens of thousands of people that is widely known in Taiwan today but it was forbidden to talk about for decades.) Later that week, a camp alumnus shared that soon after his dad attended a parents’ workshop held at TAF, he heard his father say “I love you” for the first time.

Often second and third gen lament that first gen immigrants possess the “real” knowledge that migration to the U.S. dilutes. But recently I’ve been thinking that assumptions of inevitable dilution are wrong. I’ve met second gen who find the words to articulate what our parents couldn’t, and I believe my daughter’s knowledge will surpass mine. Gatherings like TAF nurture within youth fresh possibilities of connection to Taiwan. With the declassification of Taiwan’s archives, with new stories being uncovered and recovered, and with a highly resourceful third gen, I think knowledge shall blossom and find new forms.

I fell in love with the life-affirming people at TAF, and it restored a sense of connection to the U.S. that I’d lost. I think maybe I feel lonely over in Taiwan because I have a bunch of Western/American intellectual acquaintances on my social media feed who seem enamored about China’s rise while never speaking a word about Taiwan. That lack of curiosity and dare I say moral clarity distresses me. But just being around a bunch of sweet little midwestern Asian kids, mostly second gen and third gen, who care about where their family comes from grounded me and gave me a lot of joy. Thanks to my very wonderful fellow writers Shawna Yang Ryan, Rebecca Liu, Joyce Chen, and Margaret Tu, and thanks to the visionaries who created this community, among them Leona Chen, Irina Huang, Ho Chie Tsai, Pamela Hung, and Joyce Chen Juri.

Though I enjoyed making fun of my very bare-bones college dorm, I missed it when I left. I’m planning to bring my daughter next summer as a camper. If you have children you want to bring to the camp, meet me there!

Links

• Congratulations to one of our favorite writers, Shawna Yang Ryan, author of the seminal novel Green Island, on her terrific just-released novel Anatomy. You can order here!

• If you’re in Taipei, check out Brenda Lin’s book launch on August 30th at 15:00 to 16:30. We’ll be there and are excited to share an excerpt of her book in a future substack.

• We’re a bit late to this, but we loved this scintillating post by Naomi Kanakia on Thomas Bernhard’s wide-ranging influence on contemporary literary fiction.

• A solid primer on China’s threats to invade Taiwan and whether China will copy Iran’s Strait of Hormuz blockade. Vice President Bi-khim Hsiao, Brian Hioe, and New Bloom all make an appearance.

• Panthea Lee’s moving essay on a gathering on Taiwan’s Green Island.

• We’re co-hosting a livestream on Substack with the illuminating Ukraine-based substack The CounterOffensive with Tim Mak on Wednesday, August 19th at 11 P.M. (Taiwan time!)

Book Club: Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me

Thanks to everyone for coming to our book club about Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Next we’ll read Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me for Sept 4th / 5th (Friday 7 PM EST / Saturday 7 AM Taiwan time). (Note that this time is different than the time that we wrote in our email.) After that we’ll read Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North. Everyone is welcome! Just reply to this email.

Hello dear readers! Thanks to all who replied to our missive about a film portraying the last living Taiwanese prisoner-of-war in Siberian camps. Our next rec: we urge everyone who lives in Taiwan to see All Things to All 《為一切人，成為一切》in the theater. It’s a beautiful documentary depicting Catholic priests who have worked in Hualien for over 50 years. Also, if you happen to have a connection to Pope Leo (!), tell him to watch it! It might persuade the Vatican to continue diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than switching to the PRC.

This past Tuesday, we were moved and uplifted by a joyous ceremony celebrating Taiwan Travelogue, the first Taiwanese book to win the International Booker Prize. The president and Ministry of Culture honored the trifecta of brilliant and principled women: the author Yang Shuangzi, the translator Lin King, and Springhill Publishing editor-in-chief Patience Chuang. What rock stars, what ferocity of vision and purpose.

We believe we’re witnessing a golden age of Taiwanese literary culture. This culture has been a century in the making, with ebbs and flows, but the Booker win has catapulted Taiwan to the world stage and injected a new self-confidence and optimism.

We were also dazzled by the exquisite band Tsng-kha-lâng (裝咖人), who sing in Taiwanese and performed at the ceremony. People have been telling us about this band for years, but this is the first time we’ve heard them play in person. (We blame our six-year-old!) And wow, were we blown away: the intricate harmonies, the beiguan temple music woven together with spoken storytelling, the soaring melodies over rock. Below, we share more of their songs and story.

During the ceremony, Chuang emphasized that Taiwan is a powerful force in Asia where writers from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore choose to publish. This is the “freest Mandarin-speaking country” in Asia, she said. Meanwhile, Lin King spoke of how it takes a village to bring a book like this to life and to the world. She also gave this newsletter a generous shout-out in her speech—we were stunned and taken aback. (Thank you, Lin! We want to cry.) You can find the speeches, in Mandarin, at Springhill’s Facebook page.

The very celebrity of King & Yang in Taiwan—they are household names here, we do not exaggerate—is worth thinking through. Why are people in Taiwan so proud of this moment? We believe that the pride doesn’t come from just a love for prizes and Western recognition, although that certainly is part of it. The other part of it is existential: people in Taiwan believe, correctly, that its survival depends on the world knowing of its existence. Every little bit counts. Taiwan has not yet attained universal recognition of its statehood, though we have all the legal markers of it. A country under threat of invasion needs allies.

More deeply, Taiwanese people who care about literature have longed for their stories to join the postcolonial canon. If you think about the writers who are considered canonical—from Tagore (India and Bangladesh) to Yeats (Ireland), from Senghor (Senegal) to Césaire (Martinique)—almost all wrote in English and French, the languages of their colonial overlords. But Taiwan’s history of having been colonized by three Asian regimes—the Qing, then Japanese, then the Chinese Nationalists—has made it unique as well as a bit of a black box. Paradoxically, to join the postcolonial canon, it depends on translation into Western languages.

Yet until recently, few Anglo-American publishers were interested in translating Taiwanese books to English. On the whole they expect other countries to buy their rights and translate them, but translate a tiny percentage of books. With the success of Taiwan Travelogue and the glittering talent of translators such as King, now Taiwan will not be underestimated. “Before, Taiwanese readers read literature of the world,” literary agent Gray Tan said in an interview. “Now, the world is reading Taiwan.”

And last, there’s deep pride in this book—multilingual, historically imaginative, written by a queer woman—as well as in Yang’s poignant life story. (We wrote about her story here and reviewed the book here.) Together they reflect Taiwan’s rich and idiosyncratic history. Expansive and averse to binaries, Taiwan Travelogue resist any easy ideological reduction.

We suspect there must be at least one legislator from the opposition party who ventured to read Taiwan Travelogue, trawling for “evidence” that the author has “cultural hatred of China”—a typical dog-whistle to their base in Taiwan. (This is not so different than MAGA folks in the U.S. searching for evidence of “antiwhiteness” in literature.) If so, he or she must have been sorely disappointed. Indeed, the characters in Taiwan Travelogue trade references to Chinese literature. And as Yang, King, and Chuang have all emphasized in their various speeches, literature holds a special place for complexity and nuance.

We revisited Edward Said, ever our lodestar, to think through today’s moment, of which there are parallels to Irish literary renaissance (1880s to 1930s). In his landmark essay “Yeats and Decolonization,” published in Culture and Imperialism, he compares writers such as Yeats, Darwish, and Césaire. The Négritude movement doesn’t come out so well in his view (he mostly uses Wole Soyinka to make his point), but Césaire’s expansive sensibility endures as a model. While Said disparages the nativist’s “emotional self-indulgence of celebrating one’s own identity,” he praises poets such as Césaire who abandon rigid essentialisms. Such writers express the “possibility of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world.”

We wish Edward Said were alive to see this current flourishing of Taiwanese literature; we’d love to ask him how he sees it. We think he would have liked more than he disliked. True, Taiwan isn’t so great on Palestine, but Said would have admired its self-conscious hybridity and its embrace of both East and West. Writers in Taiwan, such as Wu Mingyi and Syaman Rapongan, reflect a spirit of self-interrogation, exploring indigenous ways of life and the Taiwanese complicity in destroying the environment. Multiple languages and cultures co-exist in one book, and there’s none of the false self-adoration that Said and Soyinka so loathed. It’s fitting that Taiwan Travelogue is the book bringing Taiwan to the world stage; among King’s bold choices as a translator was her decision to bring Taiwan’s multilingual, multi-ethnic reality to surface.

When Chuang praised Taiwan as a place that Mandarin-speaking writers across Asia choose to publish, she said, “Taiwan is Taiwan—but it is also more than Taiwan.” What a lovely and eerie echo of Said’s remarks a generation before: poets of decolonization, he insisted, must envision an Ireland that is more than Ireland, Martinique more than Martinique, Pakistan more than Pakistan.

Thus to those leftist friends with whom we sometimes argue—they chafe at any sort of national identity-making, fearing its temptations to chauvinism—we insist that Taiwanese nationality has been maturing for over a hundred years. “Nationality, nationalism, nativism” must be parsed out, Said writes—and he sequences these three concepts according to their constraining power. Nativism is harmful and exclusionary, but as the Palestinian struggle teaches us, nationality can also be inclusive, a gateway to broad solidarity with other oppressed peoples.

This expansive consciousness sharply contrasts with oppression across the strait. Just this week, China passed a law that codifies its violent Han ethnonationalism. Vague legal language—you can be arrested for “undermining ethnic unity”—makes it a thought crime for Uyghurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, and other ethnic minorities to regard themselves as anything other than “Chinese.” The law encourages citizens to report on one another. The insane law also states the PRC can arrest people outside of China’s borders who “undermine ethnic unity.” The law also forbids schools to use minority languages as a primary mode of instruction.

Last week, a Tibetan activist self-immolated in protest of this law, setting himself on fire in New York. The circulated images are highly disturbing, and Mayor Mamdani said he was heartbroken, sending messages of solidarity to the Tibetan community.

The parallels to Ireland, by the way, are illuminating. Like the Taiwanese language, Irish had been banned from being spoken in schools. By the 1880s, parents “spoke Irish only to children who answered in English only,” Declan Kiberd writes in Inventing Ireland: Literature of a Modern Nation. “[Douglas] Hyde would ask children ‘Nach labhrann tu Gaelige?’—don’t you speak Irish?—and the children would believe the English spoke was Irish. (Taiwanese, by the way, is not a dialect of Mandarin; this is a common misapprehension. Linguists describe it as a separate language that evolutionarily diverged from Mandarin over a thousand years ago.) Like Taiwanese in Taiwan, Irish came to be regarded as lower-class and trashy in Ireland. Before Ireland’s president Douglas Hyde became Douglas Hyde, society ladies would gossip about him, saying, “He cannot be a gentleman because he speaks Irish.”

For Ireland—and in Taiwan, too—the artists, writers, poets, and musicians hoped to offered an alternative to the rhetoric of political leaders. Culture and politics are intertwined, yes, but politicians cannot win over the country unless the country itself is invented, reinvented, and loved by its own people. “Does not the greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it?” asked Yeats. Irish culture had to be founded on “something more positive and lasting than mere hatred of England,” writes Kiberd. Their goal was to make “Ireland once again interesting to the Irish,” deepening within people a “self-belief which might in time lead to social and cultural prosperity.”

In many ways, the timing is perfect and ripe for books like Taiwan Travelogue to enter the world stage: the late nationalism of Taiwanese people has matured, martial law has been lifted for over a generation, and the literature lacks what Said calls an “ambiance of polemic.” Yang and King’s fiery commentary—“we refuse to be second-class citizens,” as Yang has said—is different than what Taiwanese stories contain. We feel very fortunate to be living during this time of cultural flourishing.

The other big revelation of our night out was hearing the band Tsng-kha-lâng (裝咖人) play live.

We’ve been playing their song〈花巷〉 hue-hāng (”Flower Lane”) on repeat ever since hearing it at the ceremony. Here’s the official music video, which imagines a woman waiting by the flower lane for her lover, a painter taken away during the White Terror.

This song was the first Tiunn Ka-siông (張嘉祥), the band’s frontman, ever completed. He recounts that he cried at the sound of a few simple notes played by Chen Ming-chang, the musician who composed the soundtrack for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind. As Tiunn wrote the song, he imagined his grandparents walking together down a road blooming with mango trees that had been planted in the Japanese era. That road was once the village’s only route to the outside world. Four chords, he says—that was all the band could manage at the time.

Their debut album, Iā-Kuan Sûn-Tiûnn (夜官巡場, roughly “night deities patrol the grounds”), came out in 2021 and earned them a Golden Melody nomination for Best New Artist. It’s sung and recited in Taiwanese. The songs brim with ghosts, wild gods, spirit mediums, and details from the history of martial law.

Their music is also a product of Taiwan’s literary world. Tiunn studied literature and creative writing at National Donghwa University in Hualien, a university with a special place in our hearts. (This university started the country’s first indigenous studies program, and we’ve visited it for many years.) He studied with the great aforementioned Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi. Tiunn also met his fellow band members there; four of the five current band members are Donghwa graduates. (Go Donghwa!)

In early 2017, Wu Mingyi offered a course titled “Chinese-language Popular Music” at Donghwa that, despite its name, covered everything: the history of foreign rock, Taiwan’s Blacklist Studio of the 1990s, all the way up to the 2016 Nobel laureate in literature, Bob Dylan.

“To this day I can still remember the sound of Professor Ming-yi reading Bob Dylan’s lyrics with us in class,” Tiunn recalls. “It was a shock — an American folk singer could win the prize that everyone who writes literature dreams of winning. I suddenly felt that the boundaries between fields aren’t so cleanly cut, aren’t so clearly drawn. My whole creative sense was thrown open, stretched far, far out.”

Then Lin Sheng Xiang (林生祥) came to campus to perform, and hearing him live was the final push. Tiunn decided to form a band.

You can’t listen to the band without hearing the influence of Lin Sheng Xiang everywhere. He’s one of our favorite musicians, and we often share his music with our students. Read about him in our old post. (Scroll down for his music videos.) The first piece, sung alternatively in Mandarin and Vietnamese, is an homage to the Vietnamese migrant women who stand for hours cultivating water lily, a beloved Taiwanese vegetable. The second features organic tofu makers.

Tiunn says he can’t write a song from a melody alone; every song needs a story underneath it, so the fiction and the music grew together, each feeding the other. Both draw on Tiunn’s childhood in Hué-sio-tsng (火燒庄), “Burnt Village,” in Minxiong, Chiayi — the same Minxiong famous for goose meat, pineapples, and Taiwan’s most notorious haunted house.

Another song, 〈羅漢〉 Lô-hàn, is named for the lô-hàn-kha, the rootless bachelors at the bottom of village society. Tiunn knew one of these figures as a child, an odd-job man who taught him to catch catfish and frogs in the irrigation canals. As he grew older, he realized that what he saw as freedom was really poverty. Tiunn brought this figure to life three times: in this song, in a Qing-era tale, and in his novel, which features a betel-chewing, toothless drifter whom the village children adore.

One song is devoted to Tsuí-lâu-Má (水流媽), the “Water-Flow Mother.” She originated as a corpse, a drowned body that washed up under a bridge near his village. In Taiwan, bodies like hers rarely stay anonymous for long. The dead depend on the living to feed them, and by custom that duty belongs to descendants, who tend the grave and keep the incense lit. Someone who dies unclaimed has no one to perform those rites, and an untended spirit turns hungry and restless.

The community takes up the duty of tending the spirit: it recovers the body, gives it a resting place, and makes offerings. In this way, the unclaimed dead are fed and enshrined rather than forgotten. And because they died outside the proper order, they are thought to grant favors that respectable gods refuse to perform. So the villagers built her a shrine, and over time she became the kind of unofficial deity to whom the desperate and gambling pray. Her restlessness became converted into a form of power. Tiunn’s mother always told him to hurry home whenever he passed her temple.

And then there is the White Terror. One of the album’s most devastating sequences imagines Lîm Siù-bī (林秀媚), daughter of one of Chiayi’s wealthiest families, whose husband — a doctor and city councilman — went out to negotiate during the 228 Incident in 1947 while she was about to give birth, and never came home. In a spoken interlude, she addresses him decades later, incense in hand: I knew you were never coming back. I’ve repaid the funeral costs. When will we no longer have to fear dying at the muzzle of a machine gun?

Tiunn also spent five years writing a novel while composing music. A special edition pairs the book and the album in matching covers, one finished in gold foil and one in silver, so that side by side they mirror each other like gold and silver joss paper. The novel comes with QR codes to six of the songs, meant to be read and listened to together. It was also recently translated into French and Korean.

In the video below, they play with Sheng Xiang himself in 2024 at The Reporter. (We keep spotting our late-twenty-something friends in the audience—we see you Ashish and Jackie! Albert said to Michelle ruefully, “Ah, it’s P.’s fault, we don’t get out…”)

In short, this band seems to have been created to speak directly to us. We’ll be following their movements closely from here on out.

After the high of the ceremony, the very next day we were reminded that these cultural battles are still ongoing and unsettled. One of our favorite legislators, Wu Pei-yi—she’s featured prominently in the documentary Invisible Nation (our review here)—attended the ceremony Tuesday. The next day, she posted on Facebook criticizing the legislature’s budget cuts. This continues a pattern from last year, when the legislature attempted to cut wholesale the budget for public television, arts, and literature.

In the latest round of budget negotiation—yes, the current legislature still hasn’t passed the budget for this year—KMT legislator-at-large Weng Hsiao-ling copied and pasted a single proposal across at least thirteen government agencies, striking anything labeled a promotional expense without pausing to ask what the money actually is for. From the Ministry of Culture she proposed to cut NT$47 million (roughly US$1.5 million), leaving the Ministry NT$380,000 (roughly US$11,800) for marketing and promotion. On Facebook she wrote sneeringly that the Minister of Culture Li Yuan should write his own Facebook posts.

The cuts threaten to eliminate promotion budgets for the Golden Horse, Golden Bell, and Golden Melody awards, the Taipei International Book Exhibition (our favorite book fair!), Taiwan’s film festivals, and its overseas publishing outreach—the very channels and infrastructure by which Taiwan tells the world it exists.

In the KMT’s distaste towards Taiwanese culture, they share a kinship with the reactionaries who, across the Pacific, spent 2025 trying to erase the National Endowment for the Arts. (Many of you are based in the United States, so you know this story better than us.) The Trump administration proposed eliminating the agency outright in its FY2026 budget. It also abruptly canceled approved grants for hundreds of organizations, opening an estimated $27 million funding gap. The instinct is the same on both shores: treat art as a luxury the nation can jettison at any notice.

Is the timing of Weng’s proposed cuts a coincidence? Perhaps, but it isn’t surprising, since the KMT has spent decades opposing the very Taiwanese narratives now being celebrated. It was the KMT that pushed Taiwanese off the radio, required schoolchildren to memorize the rivers and provinces of a land they would never visit, and made any honest reckoning with the Japanese colonial era impossible. Opposing the kind of Taiwanese literature now emerging is, in this sense, baked into the party’s DNA.

What has changed with the KMT is its method. The KMT no longer has the power to ban books, films, and music outright, so it works through the budget instead, starving the infrastructure that carries culture to the public. People in Taiwan tend to learn that a book or film exists through award ceremonies, prizes, exhibits, fairs, showings, and foreign recognition—all events that require money and that KMT aims to defund. Choke off the money, and this emerging culture never reaches the audience waiting for it.

On a happier note, the food at the ceremony from the famed Mountain & Sea House (山海樓) was mouth-wateringly good. We had helpings of aiyu jelly and braised pork rice. (Albert often says this would be his last meal.) The menu took its cues from Taiwan Travelogue, down to a bowl of “muâ-ínn-thng” (麻薏湯/麻芛湯), which is described in the novel as a summer soup made from “newly grown jute leaves” and is meant to help you cool off. A Taichung specialty, it’s sent plenty of readers looking for the real thing since the novel came out.

Book Club: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

We love the people who come to our book club, yay! Thanks to everyone who came. Our next book is Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and we’ll meet Friday, August 7th / Saturday, August 8th. After that, we’re reading Diana Athill’s Stet, Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath (translated by Padma Viswanathan). Thanks to our book club members for their suggestions! Please reply to this email for a zoom link if you’d like to join.

Late in the documentary Memories Frozen in Time (《冰封的記憶》), directed by Hsu Ming-chun (許明淳) and available to stream for free on Taiwan’s PTV+, the camera settles on Masao Go (吳正男). Born in 1927 in Douliu, then part of Tainan Prefecture, Go was a Taiwanese subject of the Japanese Empire. Like so many young men of his generation, he was drawn into the imperial machine.

At sixteen, without his parents’ consent, he volunteered for the Japanese army and trained as a radio operator. The war’s end would carry him into Soviet captivity. He became one of the few Taiwanese swept into the Siberian camps. He is perhaps the last man left among them. Few people in Taiwan know that this generation is still alive.

When asked, softly, whether he feels lonely, Go-san answers without hesitation. “Of course,” he says. “Of course, I feel lonely.”

The end of the war found Go near an airfield in northern Korea. When the emperor’s surrender broadcast crackled over the radio on August 15, 1945, he heard it but could not make out message through the static; he assumed the emperor was exhorting his subjects to fight harder. He learned the truth on the road. His signal unit had set out for an airfield in the country’s northwest, and only when they found themselves the lone column moving north against a tide of southbound trains did they grasp that Japan had lost.

Go and two comrades struck out on foot along the railway tracks, hoping to reach Japan. They boarded a southbound train. At a station called Sinmak, a Soviet officer’s voice came over a microphone ordering every man off.

Go would spend the next years in the camps. In the last days of the war, an enormous number of Japanese personnel were imprisoned by the Red Army as it drove through Manchuria and northern Korea. Estimates of the detained run from roughly 560,000 to 900,000; somewhere between 60,000 and 300,000 died in captivity. Their fate diverged sharply from that of the roughly 3.5 million Japanese soldiers serving elsewhere overseas, most of whom the Americans and the Chinese Nationalists repatriated within a year.

Go was not sent to Japan. He disappeared instead into the Soviet camp system. Journalists at The Reporter (《報導者》) have reconstructed his journey: from Douliu and Keelung in Taiwan, by way of Yokohama, up through Korea, and then deep into the interior — Khabarovsk, Chita, Irkutsk, Taishet, and finally Kzyl-Orda, in what is now Kazakhstan. He moved through half of Asia.

Hsu and other historians have identified nineteen Taiwanese men who passed through the Soviet camps after the war. The number is almost certainly an undercount—the names in the records are all Japanese, making it difficult to tell who was of Taiwanese or Korean descent. The film follows the stories of two others, both deceased: Chen Yi-wen (陳以文, 1927–2012), who appears in footage his grandson Chen Li-hang shot in 2007, and Hsu Min-hsin (許敏信, 1921–2000), who kept a diary and whom we see through family footage and photos. In one, he poses beside a little girl dressed as a Disney princess. Now, that granddaughter and his two daughters long to know his story.

The act of recovery is remarkable in itself, and it is deeply moving to watch Go, now nearly a hundred, recount his history. We have not been able to stop thinking about one small exchange:

My son has no interest in my past — it is hard to believe how little. My three grandchildren are all in their thirties, but it never comes up. Of course I feel lonely…I survived all of that, and when I raise the subject, they have no interest. That feels lonely.

Hsu patiently reveals the texture of intergenerational trauma, how it burrows into a family. Its sources are manifold. There’s geopolitics. There are language barriers. What makes the film so interesting is Hsu’s choice to turn away from the harrowing experiences of Siberia. Silence itself is the subject of the film.

Eiko and Zuiyo, the daughters of Hsu Min-hsin, recall a stranger approaching them at their father’s funeral, sobbing. The man, they learned, had served with their father in the camps. “He saved my life,” the man told the daughters. “I was starving, and he had two cloves of garlic. He shared them.” Yet their father never spoke of Siberia. When they scour his diary, they find not a single word about his imprisonment — and nothing, of course, about a life-saving clove of garlic.

To be clear, historians have amply documented the brutalities Japanese POWs suffered at Soviet hands; the film does not dwell on them. We glimpse Go entering the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates museum in Japan. Reading placards from his wheelchair, Go learns of a dog rescued from the Siberian camps. The dog went on to live a charmed life in Japan. “Is the story of this dog real?” he asks, incredulous.

The film cuts to an archivist explaining that wartime record-keeping left no way to tell whether a given soldier came from Taiwan or Korea. As Go exits the museum, the director’s voiceover notes in a somber, bitter tone: “The museum memorialized a dog, but does not mention any Taiwanese.”

Another heartbreaking moment. When Go speaks at an online event hosted by another Japanese museum, he is courteous, deferential. In flawless Japanese, he apologizes for having kept his Taiwanese citizenship all these decades, for never having become Japanese. The scene unsettled us. It unsettled the director too, who shared at our event that he was deeply upset as he filmed it. Here is a man in his nineties, a survivor of the Siberian camps, a former subject of an empire that has never recognized his sacrifice, enduring the indifference of his own children and grandchildren (who have perhaps taken their cue from Japan itself)—and he remains excruciatingly polite. He feels compelled to apologize for his Taiwanese identity.

Memories Frozen in Time is a profound meditation on silence and the political gulf between generations. For the men who survived the Soviet prison camps, the post-war silence and alienation may bind them together even more tightly than the camps themselves.

In Japan, Go endures the lack of interest from his Japanese son; in Taiwan, Chen endures a similar fate. His son Ming-liang, educated under martial law by the Chinese Nationalists, is ashamed of his father’s associations with the Japanese. Ming-liang and his son Li-hang, in turn, disagree deeply about Taiwan’s history and politics. In one of the most wrenching scenes of the film, Ming-liang watches footage of his father being interviewed by Li-hang. When the director asks whether he had ever known these details, Ming-liang goes silent. His father had never told him anything.

But the film is also fundamentally hopeful about history’s restorative potential. It warmly portrays individuals actively assembling a coherent picture of a father or grandfather from only fragments. We glimpse Li-Hang playing baseball, wearing a jersey whose front says HISTORY and the back reads Kageyama, his grandfather’s name in Japanese. Watching the film, Albert had a hunch that the director Ming-chun becomes a sort of surrogate son to Go. With Go’s son noticeably absent in the film, it is Ming-chun who asks Go questions and affirms the worth of Go’s story.

At our event, Ming-chun seemed to confirm this hunch. Ming-chun shared that his own father had died when he was a child, and Go is roughly the age his dad would have been. We imagine that Go is comforted in these last years on earth to share his story to a younger person. This fall Memories in Time will be released in Japan. Ming-chun and his wife will go to Tokyo to attend the premiere, celebrating its release alongside Go.

*

Memories Frozen in Time appears amid a surge of interest in Taiwan’s Japanese colonial period. Readers of this newsletter have already heard about Taiwan Travelogue, which won this year’s International Booker Prize and set off a sharp debate in Taiwan over how to weigh those colonial decades.

Why are these stories surfacing now, eighty years on? The simplest answer is time. The youngest conscripts are nearing a hundred, and their children and grandchildren are racing to reconstruct these lives before the last witnesses are gone. In Taiwan the work comes later than almost anywhere else, because for decades the subject was forbidden. Any man who had worn the Japanese uniform kept quiet under the Nationalist regime. And a man who came home from the Soviet Union carried a heavier mark still, what people called a “red label.”

Because of that “red label,” when Hsu returned to Taiwan from the camps, he was deported — sent to Japan by the KMT, and turned away even by his own frightened family. Japan was little kinder: even though these men received a heroes welcome, soon afterwards Japanese employers treated returnees from Soviet captivity as probable spies and kept them under watch. Many turned to underground work. Their stories reflect the tragedy of small countries caught between empires: in just five years, these men were swallowed by three empires— Japanese, Chinese, and Soviet.

The film joins a wave of recent work on Taiwanese soldiers of the Japanese Empire. The drama Three Tears in Borneo 《聽海湧》 follows Taiwanese men conscripted to guard Allied prisoners in wartime Borneo; Lau Kek-huat’s documentary From Island to Island 《由島至島》 traces Taiwanese drawn into Japan’s southern war. The final volume of Li Chiao’s （李喬）Wintry Night trilogy 《寒夜三部曲)》, Lone Lamp 《孤燈》, follows Taiwanese youths shipped to the South Seas and left to die in the Philippines. The first full English translation, translated by Jim Weldon and Michael Nakhiengchanh, was published by Bookman Books. An excerpt of Lone Lamp has been adapted into the gorgeous graphic novel Sobbing published by Avanguard Books, illustrated by the great artist Ruan Guang-min (阮光民）. (A sidenote: Its English translation will be done by the Booker Prize-winning Lin King, who has been a champion of not only Taiwanese writers but artists too.)

These works reflect some of the most cutting-edge research historians have pioneered. Chen Li-hang himself is trained as a historian, and he reconstructed the Siberian captivity of his grandfather in his 2021 book Minus Sixty-Eight Degrees 《零下六十八度》. Hsu Hsueh-chi’s (許雪姬) Diaspora and Return: Taiwanese in Manchuria, 1905–1948 《離散與回歸：在滿洲的臺灣人》, published in 2023, is a work of oral history that took her nearly thirty years to assemble, gathering the testimony of Taiwanese who went north as civilians, as construction hands, as students training in Manchukuo’s medical colleges.

On a geekier note, Memories Frozen in Time shows how the historical profession has moved, asking questions that now drive the field: how empires made their colonial subjects, how those subjects were remade once the empire fell, and how to write a single life across several empires. Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway and Sayaka Chatani’s Nation-Empire have recast colonial Taiwan in just these terms, following Taiwanese out through the wider circuits of the Japanese empire rather than treating the island on its own.

But the timing is also political, and there is no use pretending otherwise. Under the Chinese Nationalists, the official story tried to place Taiwan firmly within the confines of Chinese national history. They treated the Japanese decades as a shameful interruption to be hurried past or buried altogether. To recover these imperial subjects is to construct a fresh account of Taiwan’s twentieth century. To document their human experience refuses both the Republic of China’s mainland-centered narrative and Beijing’s claim to an unbroken Chinese sovereignty over the island. To tell the story of a Taiwanese man who fought for Japan and suffered in a Soviet camp before being “repatriated” to Japan, all while refusing to give up his Taiwanese citizenship is, among other things, to insist that Taiwan’s past is its own and does not resolve neatly into any narrative.

*

Storytelling carries a particular weight in Taiwan. Compare Taiwan to the other societies that have come out of authoritarianism or war. There is a familiar repertoire of things such societies do to mark the end of a regime: war crimes trials, amnesty, lustration laws, truth and reconciliation commissions, the abolition of the death penalty, compensation to victims, public memory. Taiwan did only the latter two. It held no equivalent of Nuremberg; it has not, like much of Central and Eastern Europe, purged officials of the old order; it never held a single perpetrator to account; it never abolished the death penalty as a way of disavowing the executions of the past. What it has done, haltingly and incompletely, is public history and public memory—the museums, the books, the films, the family reckonings like this one.

The result is a public memory that is messy, fragmented, and far from settled. But we want to resist reading that as failure. The fragmentation also reflects pluralism: there is no single official line that everyone is obliged to recite, which is exactly why a documentary like this one can exist and find an audience. And the film is honest about the limits of any tidy political reading. On one side, it shows how much a national story can anchor a person—the granddaughter of Hsu Min-hsin in Japan says simply, “My grandfather was Taiwanese.” She is not ashamed of her grandfather’s second-class status.

So perhaps the film does not offer redemption in a narrowly political sense. So what else could it possibly offer? Here we found ourselves reaching for Walter Benjamin. In the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940 as the world was darkening around him, Benjamin proposed that the present is bound to the past by a kind of secret agreement: that the generations who came before expect us to exert a “weak Messianic power.” The dead lay a claim on us that we cannot settle cheaply. It is a strange, almost theological idea, and we are not sure we fully believe it. But sitting with this film, watching a son finally hear what his father could never say, watching a granddaughter piece together a hidden life, we thought we understood what Benjamin was after. The redemption on offer here is not national vindication. It is something smaller and more intimate—the simple act of one generation listening to another and refusing to let a life vanish into silence.

You can watch the entire documentary for free on through PTV+, you just need to sign up for free account.

This piece grew out of a conversation held at Citizen Bookstore (市民書店), organized by the wonderful people at Plain Law Movement (法律白話文運動) and Khí-Sū Culture Publishing (挑興文化). Thanks to founder Joshua Shu-wei Yang, Finn Wu, producer Diana Fu, to the kind audience members who all came out to our intimate gathering or joined us online, and of course Ming-hsu.

This is part 1 of a series on the Taiwanese prisoners of war in the Siberian camps. Look out for part 2 from the terrific translator Petula Parris. She reflects on the process of translating part of Li Lu’s (李璐) Prisoner of Snow《雪的俘虜》, a novel that also describes the experience of Taiwanese soldiers in Manchuria. Our friend & reader Hanling Wu’s masters thesis on Taiwanese prisoners of war was also helpful in writing this piece.

A Correction

A correction. Last week we incorrectly cited Chris Horton’s piece in Nikkei Asia. We wrote that Taiwan’s vice president Hsiao Bi-Khim spoke at the European parliament. A sharp-eyed reader wrote in to correct us: Hsiao did not speak at the EU Parliament, but in a private meeting room within the Parliament building, booked by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. (Horton’s original piece also states that she spoke to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.) We have corrected our piece. Thank you for taking such care with reading our work!

Other news

• On June 30, from 14:00-15:30, Ke Ren, an associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross, is giving a talk “Peace, Propaganda, and Public Diplomacy: The International Peace Campaign and the Chinese League of Nations Union in the Second World War” at the National Central Library. Ke is a friend of the newsletter and a fantastic scholar, it’s going to be a great talk!

• The always brilliant Sebastian Veg, a professor of intellectual history at the Centre for Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) has a terrific interview with Le Monde (in French). Its title: “In China, there is no longer any space for holding senior leaders personally accountable.”

• We’re touched by this lovely tribute to Michelle’s teaching on the National Chengchi University website. We stumbled upon it ourselves—the student who wrote it, Wan-Shan Sandra Wu, was so humble and didn’t even tell Michelle about it. Very generous & kind.

Book Club: Half A Life

We loved talking to you all about Niall Williams’s This is Happiness!

We’ll talk about Darin Strauss’s Half a Life on June 26th (Friday 7 PM EST/Saturday 7 AM Taiwan time), and after that, we’ll read Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This for Friday, August 7th / Saturday, August 8th. After that, we’re reading Diana Athill’s Stet, Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath (translated by Padma Viswanathan). Thanks to our book club members for their suggestions! Please reply to this email for a zoom link if you’d like to join.

But first a quick update: we have an event this Thursday evening, May 28th with the Plain Law Movement (法律白話文運動) and Khí-Sū Culture Publishing Ltd. (挑興文化). We’re honored to be in conversation with director Hsu Ming-chun, discussing his beautiful documentary Memories Frozen in Time. It retraces the forgotten journey of Taiwanese soldiers conscripted by Japan, captured by the Soviets, and exiled to Siberia. It’s a hybrid event in English at 7 P.M. at Citizen Bookstore! Link here. Hope to see you there.

Our social media feed is probably 80 percent about Taiwan Travelogue winning the International Booker Prize 2026. We’re so proud! This is the first time any Mandarin language book has won the Booker, and the first time Taiwan has won. More below. Congrats Yáng and Lin!

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Hello! We’re thinking of all of you. We’re back this week with an interview with Kevin Wang, who was born in China and migrated to the U.S. when he was nine years old. It’s been four years since he moved to Taiwan. He talks about his journey to becoming a translator & writer, what it’s like being Chinese American in Taiwan, and how he’s made a life here.

A brief update: a couple of weekends ago, we tagged along on a university trip to Guangfu Township, Hualien led by Professor Gina Tsai, herself a Hualien native. She and her amazing assistant Casper brought over 40 college students from National Chengchi University. Together we went to a farm that was ground zero of last year’s floods. She told us said the farm would not exist without the 100,000 people in Taiwan who spontaneously traveled across the country to shovel mud. (These were the “shovel superheroes” of Taiwan.) We also visited an indigenous village, where we learned how to craft eco-containers from paper…

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We’re so sorry we’ve been out of touch! We’ve felt an incredible sense of writer’s block because of all of the craziness in the world; we’ve been thinking of the senseless misery and violence in Iran and Lebanon. We’ve also had a busy few weeks of travel; Albert was at a conference in Boston on religious history and Michelle went to a conference in Chicago with the Taiwan Innocence Project, then onto a book fair in Bologna, where she shared books from Taiwan. We’ll share a substantial update about these travels soon.

In the meantime, check out Michelle’s piece about Taiwan’s determination to preserve its sovereignty in The Dial, as well as an interview. Albert is also thrilled to share that Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History, co-edited with the wonderful Emily Baum, just came out with the Harvard Asia Center.

Today we’re delighted to share an interview with Kevin Wang, translator of the Taiwanese writer Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets 《子彈是餘生》. Te…

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This week, we’re reprinting a book review Michelle wrote of Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, translated beautifully by Lin King. Set in Japanese-rule Taiwan, the novel was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize. This review was originally published in China Books Review. Our book club read Taiwan Travelogue last year—thank you to everyone who joined us! We’re big fans of both Yang and King, who are brilliant and passionate advocates for Taiwan. It’s a joy to see Taiwanese literature receiving international recognition.

A shout-out to China Books Review for such a smooth editorial experience and for letting us reprint the piece here! Thanks to editors Alec Ash and Taili Ni for being wonderful to work with, and to Taili for kindly commissioning this piece. We recommend signing up for their free newsletter—and you can follow them on Substack here.

Also, Aida Levy-Hussen gave me incisive feedback on early draf…

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Albert and Michelle here. Happy Lunar New Year! We last wrote about our deep sense of paralysis at our current moment. We still feel unmoored, as there’s been so much bad news: the absurd geopolitical standoff between the US and the EU over Greenland; the violent occupation of Minnesota; the crackdown in Iran that left thousands dead; and the relentless, simmering military tension right here in the Taiwan Strait. Every time we’ve tried to start this newsletter in the past couple of weeks, we’ve felt at a loss.

But! Like almost all of social media, we’ve been transfixed by Alysa Liu. The quick primer, for those of you who don’t know: Liu became the youngest U.S. national champion in figure skating history in 2019, at just thirteen years old. She participated in the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, where she won a bronze medal in the team event — competing, remarkably, in the country her father had fled.

Alysa’s father, Arthur Liu, was a political dissident who took pa…

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Hello dear readers,

We apologize for being out of touch. Partly it’s the continuation of the end-of-year crush that always feels so intense in Taiwan. (We’ve had mountains of work, as well as visitors in town amid our non-Western work schedule.) But we’ve felt agitated and sickened by the news, which is awful and relentless—Maduro’s abduction, the killings of thousands of protesters in Iran, and ICE’s murder of Renee Good and terrorizing of Minneapolis. We feel fury at the authoritarian lawlessness of ICE. And now the senseless, self-destructive grab at Greenland will destroy a 75-year-old alliance with NATO. Looming over us is the sense that the more violent, isolationist, and authoritarian the U.S. becomes, the more China will feel empowered to invade Taiwan; most recently, China simulated a blockade with live-fire missiles.​​

This piece by Damon Linker—tit…

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Michelle and Albert here. Sorry we’ve been out of touch—we’ve both had a really nasty bout of illness, and the end of the year in Taiwan is always a whirlwind of events. Plus! We went to Mexico for ten days to attend the FIL in Guadalajara, the biggest Spanish-speaking book fair. We had an amazing time and are still processing everything we learned.

Today, Michelle reflects on revisiting Middlemarch, middle age, and marriage. (So many Ms!) After that, we share notes from our events in Taiwan the past month.

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Albert and Michelle here. We were in Tainan over the weekend for a poignant 25-year anniversary of Lu Cheng’s execution. It was organized so lovingly, with such thought and care, by the Taiwan Innocence Project. The event featured a screening of Tsai Tsung-Lung’s documentary Formosa Homicide Chronicle II: The Case of Lu Cheng (島國殺人紀事2), followed by speeches and a candlelight vigil. The Innocence Project also prepared a table of Lu’s favorite snacks for us to eat. Our six-year-old munched on a Taiwanese equivalent of Cheetos, while we ate poria cake, which is chewy, lightly sweet, and made of rice flour.

Movingly, the Taiwan Innocence Project had organized the event in Erkong Military Dependents’ Village—now a cultural park, but once the neighborhood where Lu and his family lived. Many of Lu’s childhood friends were there: people who had grown up alongside him, who still remembered him as a boy. The familiarity of the place le…

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The Taiwanese New Wave first emerged in the 1980s, when a new generation of filmmakers rejected the formulaic studio melodramas that had dominated Taiwanese screens. Instead, they chose to turn the camera to scenes of everyday life, filming the streets, apartments, and uneasy silences of a rapidly changing society. Their long takes and understated realism gave shape to a new moral and emotional vocabulary. Attuned to the weight of history and the d…

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Albert and Michelle here. A lot has happened in Taiwan since we last wrote. Flooding in Hualien, on Taiwan’s eastern coast, was caused by Super Typhoon Ragasa, which tore through the Philippines before moving on to China. At least nineteen people have died, and the hardest-hit area was Guangfu Township. In the aftermath, many criticized Hualien’s political leadership for issuing delayed warnings, as they knew the lake that caused the flood was vulnerable to collapse during heavy rainfall.

While the political fallout is still unfolding, what has inspired people in Taiwan is the overwhelming show of support from across the country. More than 30,000 volunteers—nicknamed “shovel superheroes”—have traveled to Hualien to help clean up and dig out homes buried in mud. Read Helen Davidson’s excellent reporting here, and here is a good video clip from TaiwanPlus that shows the solidarity that ordinary Taiwanese have shown in the wake of disaster.

This week we’ve had a long weekend (meaning no childcare, joy!!) due to the National Day of the Republic of China, which falls on October 10th. This means there are the usual parades and important speeches by important people. And, there are flags everywhere. Our no-longer-a-baby P. is very into flags these days and keeps asking whether that’s the flag of Taiwan; we keep having to tell her, well, it’s a little complicated.

In our household, we tend to mark October 10th for a different reason. It’s the World Day Against the Death Penalty. To observe the day, the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) has organized its eight film festival that features films related to abuses of the judicial system. The sixteen films come from fourteen countries and explore how abuses and errors within the criminal legal system shape the lives of individuals and families.

To commemorate the day, we’re re-posting one of our older reflections. Some of the most compelling films and television produced in Taiwan in recent years have taken up the theme of judicial error. One of these films, To Meet to Forget, is also featured in this year’s festival. And if you missed the screenings in Taipei—don’t worry! The festival is going on tour, with showings on 25–26 October at Hualien Railway Cinema and 8–9 November at Neiwei Arts Center in Kaohsiung.

Three Recommendations: Port of Lies, To Meet to Forget, and Lost in Perfection 

All of these stories center around a murder committed in Taiwan. All depict a defendant being sentenced to death. All depict the victim’s loved ones getting jerked around. All show how sensational journalism dehumanizes the person arrested for the crime. The truth—did he or she really do it? If so, why?—barely matters. Public dialogue remains impoverished; leaders don’t dare to speak, and the opportunity is missed to articulate important questions: How does social and economic advantage create crime? Why do people tend to believe that the person arrested is guilty, even before the trial has begun? How might we grieve the dead beyond calling for a defendant’s execution? 

These three stories do more than just critique the criminal legal system; they dissect and obliterate illusions of meritocracy in a society whose winners were educated at top schools and have jobs that exert social and political power. Judges come across especially poorly in all of them. “The judge doesn’t listen to you. He convicts you on purpose,” says Cheng Hsing-tse, who spent fourteen years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Cheng, whose story is told in Yu-Lun Shih’s documentary To Meet to Forget, says this without much anger, as if he’s merely explaining a fact he learned the hard way. Of the Ministry of Justice, which reviewed the court’s findings, he says, “They don’t care if you’re innocent or not.”

Those words reflect the sum total of Cheng’s critique of the state. Of the three stories, To Meet to Forget is the most delicate and diplomatic in its depiction of the ruling class. Shih lets Cheng’s dignity and character speak for themselves. This makes sense, because we assume—and hope—that the film will be shown to prosecutors, judges, and future lawyers. One of Cheng’s diary entries reads: “A week ago, there was a murder of an elementary student in Beitou. And people started talking about the death penalty again. Legislators sought immediate execution of all on death row. As a result, the Ministry of Justice executed six tonight.”

By contrast, Port of Lies and Lost in Perfection, both fictional, are deliciously savage in how they dethrone the educated class. In the former, we see four mild-mannered judges playing mahjongg. As they shuffle tiles and sip tea, they make racist remarks about indigenous people. The scene is terrifying, in part because of how innocuous and commonplace these old men look. (If you’ve ever been to a Lunar New Year gathering, you’ve probably witnessed something similar.) One judge asks his colleagues to help him rig the distribution of cases in order to expedite the execution of an Indonesian migrant worker. Why? He wants his son, a law student, to stop working on the case. If the defendant’s dead, after all, there will be no conviction for his son to appeal. Dad is worried that his peskily idealistic kid will be “tainted,” and that this case will distract him from the track toward a prestigious career as a judge. 

That Port of Lies eviscerates judges is a vital clue to the changing mores in Taiwan, where a test-based civil servant system creates belief in equal opportunity. Becoming a judge is especially hard: only the top 1 percent make it. (One law student told us that immediately after she passed the exam to become a lawyer—the bar exam here is curved steeply too, with a 10 percent pass rate—she was pressured by her mother to take the judge test.) 

The Chinese title of Lost in Perfection (惡女）literally translates to Disgusting Woman, which is how a misogynist prosecutor describes someone he’s convinced is a scammer. The woman, who has only a high school education, dates men, cooks for them, cleans their homes, and takes care of their elderly mothers. They fall in love with her, give her money, and are so devastated when she leaves them that they commit suicide. The prosecutor believes she’s brainwashed and killed them, and his repulsion at how she earns her money reflects his assumption that he’s earned his virtuously. All the while, he relies on a journalist to do his job for him, asking her to distort stories and stir up public outcry. 

Together, these films tell a story of elite contempt toward people in the margins: working-class women, indigenous communities, Southeast Asian migrant workers, those from rural areas, the incarcerated. In Taiwan, this contempt takes on a particular register: You didn’t study hard enough! You hung out with people who didn’t study hard enough! That’s why you’re where you are! These are hardly caricatures. Our current presidential candidate, Ko Wen-je, whom we wrote about last Sunday, tried to invalidate a critic by saying, “I went to a better school than him.” (Similarly, the mayor of Hsinchu, accused of wrongdoing, said she went to the best schools and therefore couldn’t possibly be guilty.)

These stories suggest a real historical shift in Taiwanese visual media. Half a generation ago, progressive films grappled with issues related to transitional justice: White Terror, repression, and censorship under martial law. While those stories are important, today’s trifecta shows how the popularity of the death penalty here acts as a portal to broader questions about social and economic inequality. Solidarity with minority groups, takedowns of meritocracy, and explorations of harsh penal attitudes are new themes, pointing to an exciting trend. 

Read on to learn more about these stories.

To Meet to Forget

Cheng Hsing-tse—“A-tse,” as he’s known—spent fourteen years on death row before being found innocent. The most moving images in To Meet to Forget show his acts as a free man: planting rice on a paddy, mashing taro over a stovetop, getting a haircut, running along the ocean shore, taking a walk with his niece, reading letters from people still inside.

“Sometimes I think that I’m still in my thirties,” he muses, looking out at the Pacific. “But seeing how people have changed—seeing how my mom has gotten so old … It’s impossible. That pulls me back into reality.” He continues: “Time passes. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t start over. Just like how a person cannot be resurrected.”

Cheng’s case is famous among criminal lawyers here because it set an astonishing precedent: it was the first time prosecutors moved for a retrial. Nobody likes to admit they made a mistake, especially not prosecutors. “Prosecutors are their own country,” his lawyer once told me. Moving for a retrial could also be seen as a betrayal, a rough equivalent of snitching among police officers, since doing so is a strong signal to the judge that evidence tampering or misconduct has occurred. Last year, Cheng and former constitutional court judge Jade Hsu (許玉秀)—one of the good ones!—spoke together at a gathering sponsored by the Taiwan Innocence Project (TIP). Hsu, a key player, had herself convened a meeting to review the evidence in his case.

When you’ve been wrongfully convicted, you begin to see the world in binary terms: those who care and those who don’t. “Those who care will help us,” A-tse says. They listened, helped him find evidence. “As for those who don’t care, they won’t lift a finger even if they know. They have no intention to help you.”

One moving aspect of To Meet to Forget is how gracefully it depicts his decades-long, still-unfolding, warm relationship with those who cared, who fought for years to exonerate him. There are two major NGOs—TIP and Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP)—and the documentary offers a glimpse of their members’ origin stories. One lovely scene shows the lawyer Lo Shih-hsiang, who now directs TIP, helping A-tse find the right size shirt. Another scene shows staffers at TAEDP and TIP helping him make a music video. These NGOs break apart the hierarchy between client and attorney, putting into action the activists’ aspiration to let people at the margins form solutions.

One surprising and powerful throughline of To Meet to Forget is the way it considers the position of victims and imagines what restoration might look like. The victim in A-tse’s case, a police officer, left behind a son in the fifth grade. Cheng vividly recalls the look of hatred the young son gave him at the funeral home. Almost two decades later, the son is a police officer himself. “Who will apologize to us?” he asks. The state has to apologize to him too. His family thought the whole time that A-tse killed his father; now they have consider this was not true. At the core is the desire for an apology: victims deserve one from the state as well.

“What would you say to him?” the director asks him at the end of the film.

“I don’t know, we’ll have to see when it happens,” he replies. We’ll just… go with the flow.”

The film suggests that, in meeting, they might find some hope of forgetting the confusion, grief, and unnecessary loss in their lives.

After the screening, A-tse hurried back to Taichung to dig up and plant radishes.

**Thanks to Chiting Wang, 王昱翔, Jada Wang, for helping locate photographs and quotes from To Meet to Forget.

Lost in Perfection (惡女)

This thriller brims with astute observations about class hypocrisy, sexism, and the symbiotic relationship between the media and the criminal legal system. Hsin-Yin Sung previously directed the wonderful Golden Horse–winning On Happiness Road (幸福路上).

The plot: a woman may have seduced and killed three men for their money. This scandal delights the public, in part because the accused is unattractive: not a model, a bit gaudy, older, not “cultured.” The media dubs her “Unattractive Femme Fatale.” Readers eat it up, the media brands her a killer, and the prosecutor ultimately benefits. “You made the prosecutor a hero!” one reporter says to her boss.

Meanwhile, the defendant claims she’s innocent. She cleaned and cooked for these boyfriends. In at least one case, she even took care of his sick mother. The men voluntarily gave her money and ultimately took their lives because they couldn’t handle it when she broke up with them.

Not so, say the prosecutor and the media: those men didn’t consent. They were “brainwashed.”

The assumptions underlying this claim are incredible. So a woman should never expect to be paid for cooking, for cleaning, for bathing her boyfriend’s sick mother? A man who believes that domestic labor deserves some financial compensation has been brainwashed? Another assumption has to do with attractiveness: if the woman were pretty and educated, then the men really might have killed themselves—but since she’s ugly and uneducated, she must have tricked them into liking her.

Feminists who launched wages-for-housework campaigns in the 1970s have long understood the basic idea that when domestic labor is unpaid, it doesn’t get valued. Instead it receives contempt. That contempt is systematically dismantled in 惡女, which also suggests how class divisions nurture it. Upper-class families outsource the cleaning, cooking, nannying, and caretaking of aged parents; this in turn keeps the marriage “pure” and insulated from disagreements about household labor and transactional exchanges.

The foil for the accused is a successful career woman, a TV anchor. She’s snobby and condescending, disdainful of how the defendant makes money; in contrast, she believes, her money is earned “purely” and her upcoming marriage to a wealthy dentist is uncontaminated. But how does she really earn her money? By feeding the public questionable stories that legitimize an off-the-rails penal system and distract from meaningful political and social issues. What are the financial dynamics of her marriage? Because her fiancé’s parents approve of her credentials, they made the down payment on her apartment.

惡女 inspired us to return to anthropologist Mary Douglas’s classic book Purity and Danger, which describes “creative formlessness” as a threat to order and power. Figures on the margins—Jews in England, Joan of Arc, Kachin wives—are kinds of sorcerers or witches whose “ambiguous status […]  makes them appear as a danger to those belonging fully.” To those with power, they appear to be “intruders.”

Lost in Perfection is a feminist and uniquely Taiwanese take on the criminal legal system.

Port of Lies

The plot of this popular TV show: an Indonesian migrant fisherman kills an indigenous family of three, including a two-year-old. He is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. There’s little question that he did it. But why did he do it?

Directed and written by Tang Fu-rui, Port of Lies is set in contemporary Taiwan, with a large part filmed in Keelung, the country’s northernmost port city. (The show has real The Wire season 2 vibes.) The murdered family are Amis, the largest ethnic group among indigenous peoples in Taiwan. In the 1960s, families of Amis started moving to a harbor on the northern coast that was soon nicknamed 八尺門 （Bachimen, literally translated as “eight-foot door”）after the ramshackle houses built from abandoned shipboards. By the 1980s, around two hundred families lived in squalid conditions, and several high-profile news articles and photo essays shed light on their plight. In the 1990s, the government built new social housing and relocated them.

The show’s hero, Tung Pao-chu—in a wonderful, playful performance by Christopher Lee—is an Amis cousin of the victim who grew up in Bachimen who attended law school in Taipei and became a public defender. But now, unexpectedly, he’s been assigned to defend the Indonesian migrant who killed his cousin. Some of the most poignant parts of Port of Lies depict Pao-chu’s identity crisis: he left behind a life in Keelung to be part of an elite court system. Though he speaks up for “his people”—there’s a telling scene between him and a fellow law student, directly following a magnificent speech in which he tears down the state’s logic about the death penalty—his family back home thinks of him as a traitor. Meanwhile, he continues to wonder why he has to serve a legal system that’s historically screwed over his own community.

Pao-chu’s “success” story also points to the fact that more indigenous people have been absorbed into Taiwanese bureaucracy; another sympathetic character is an Amis cop. Few Amis have continued the traditional work of fishing. Faced with a labor shortage, Taiwanese fishing companies have recently had to rely on migrant workers to fill their boats—Taiwan has the second largest long-line fishing fleet in the world—and the majority of these workers come from Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The working conditions on these boats are terrible: Taiwanese employers withhold wages, deny medical treatment, confiscate passports, and physically abuse, starve, and confine workers. The migrants are at sea for months at a time, sometimes even years. It’s modern-day slavery.)

The show is a gritty portrayal of this ugly business. Almost all the bad guys are the Han people who run everything: the courts, the businesses, Taiwanese society. The biggest villain is a local fishing tycoon who pits the indigenous and Indonesians against each other, making the indigenous captain do terrible things like throw a sea observer overboard. Here in the Kuo-Wu household, we started to heckle certain characters:

“Han striver!”

“Han supremacist!”

(At this our four-year-old daughter looked up, slightly frightened.) 

The show depicts only one Han person who’s actually good: the aforementioned law student, whose judge father wants his son to stop being a bleeding-heart liberal. The son’s thesis is on psychological evaluations of people sentenced to death. He also has an unfortunate girlfriend, whom thankfully—spoiler alert!—he dumps. She too has passed the judge test. She’s obsessed with studying abroad, is wary of the anti–death penalty movement (she has to stay apolitical for her career’s sake), and sees the world in flat, instrumental terms. At one point the law student tells her he plans to write another paper about the death penalty, and she asks why in the world he would do that. Then, thinking out loud, she reasons, “Well, there’s a requirement to write a paper in our judge training, so it’s not a total waste of time.”

Another scene shows a new twist on Taiwan’s plight as an unrecognized nation. The villainous fishing tycoon justifies his evasion of international fishing rules by observing that the UN is extra hard on Taiwan, which doesn’t have any representatives to defend itself. (We’ve heard from an environmentalist friend that the UN slapped Taiwan with fines for endangering wildlife, while it looked the other way for similar offenses by other countries, including China.) 

Finally, Port of Lies portrays the multiculturalism and multilingualism of Taiwan with grace. In some scenes, at least five languages are spoken on screen: Amis, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Indonesian, English. Particularly thrilling is hearing the indigenous characters mix Amis, Mandarin, and Taiwanese. Pao-chu’s signature line—“Holy Mazu!”—is a mix of Taiwanese and English, and a syncretic nod to the mixture of Catholicism and Taiwanese popular religion. (Mazu is the goddess of the sea in Chinese popular religious canon, and can often appear in popular iconography, like Mary, mother of Jesus.)

Upcoming events with Carol Steiker, New Bloom, and Invisible Nation; plus, related links on the death penalty

Upcoming events with Michelle in Taipei:

• On October 26th 7 PM (EST), I’ll be moderating a virtual conversation inspired by Vanessa Hope’s wonderful film Invisible Nation, examining Taiwan’s experience and what it can teach the world about protecting democracy. If you’re interested, let me know.

• On November 22nd, Saturday, I’ll speak at Daybreak & New Bloom about Taiwanese comics, graphic novels, and children’s books and Books from Taiwan. I’ll be in conversation with Brian Hioe, Elizabeth Hsinyin Lee, and Michael Fahey and will be bringing a full suitcase of books. The time hasn’t been set yet, but feel free to reply if you’d like to attend.

• On November 13th, Thursday at 7 PM, I’ll moderate a conversation at Touat Books between Carol Steiker, a scholar and death penalty expert at Harvard Law School (and my very dear former teacher—she’s a legend and has a heart of gold), and the Taiwan Alliance Against the Death Penalty (TAEDP). Professor Steiker will also be giving two major lectures earlier in the week; many thanks to Chengyi Huang (see our interview with him) for organizing:

  • November 12th, 10 AM–12 PM: “The Prospects of Worldwide Abolition of the Death Penalty” at Academia Sinica. This will be moderated by the law institute’s director Chien-Liang Lee, and the discussant is lawyer Nigel N.T. Li, a lifetime advocate for abolition in Taiwan.

  • November 13th, 10 AM–12 PM: “Challenges Facing Justice Reform in a Time of Political Backlash” at National Taiwan University College of Law. This will be moderated by Jade Hsu, former Constitutional Court justice, with Professor Kai-ping Su, who teaches at National Taiwan University College of Law, as the discussant.

    Other related links:

• A short documentary depicts the forty-eight hours following A-tse’s release, directed by Shih. We love the scene where he jumps over a fire, a Taiwanese folk ritual whose aim is to kill evil spirits.

• Our piece last fall about sensationalistic news and the death penalty in Taiwan; plus an interview with TAEDP’s leaders and with Chengyi Huang.

• Michelle’s piece about restorative justice in New York Review of Books

• On E.P. Thompson, judges, and judge fetishization in law school

• A smart review of Lost in Perfection (in Mandarin)

• Singapore executed Pannir Selvam Pranthaman on October 8th, 2025. As tireless activist and writer Kirsten Han writes in We, the Citizen:

  His older sister Sangkari told me that, when he was younger and free, Pannir was never really one for studying. While on death row, though, Pannir began to read—first in Malay, then in English—and then to write. He was prolific, producing poetry and songs that shared his thoughts on death row conditions, on his love for his family, on his disdain for scheming politicians, on current affairs and the state of the world.

  His first poetry collection, Death Row Literature: A Collection of Poems, was officially launched just one week before he received his third, and last, execution notice. Among the belongings that the prison handed over to his family post-execution was the manuscript for a second poetry collection. His words were a window into his inner life, reminding us that prisoners aren’t faraway, abstract characters, but people who think and dream and feel, too.
  
  Becoming a poet and a writer from death row—armed with only loose sheets of paper and ballpoint pen refills—is already an impressive feat, but Pannir didn’t stop there. He persuaded his sisters to set up an NGO, Sebaran Kasih, to serve vulnerable communities and death row families in Malaysia. He asked them to get his songs professionally produced, even pinpointing the Malaysian artistes he wanted to perform his music. He encouraged them to step up to campaign not just for him, but for an end to the death penalty as a whole.

Book Club Details

We loved talking to you all about Patricia Engel’s Veins of the Ocean! Our next book club is Friday, October 24th 7 PM EST / Saturday, October 25th 7 AM Taiwan time. We’re going to read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo for the October book club. After, we’ll be reading Miranda July’s All Fours, Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett’s James, and Natalia Ginzburg’s Road to the City. The book club is open to all paying subscribers. Thanks to our book club members for their suggestions! Please reply to this email for a zoom link.

And finally, we had our first day of class at the women’s juvenile detention center in Taipei this week. Every week, I take five NCCU students, and together we write poems & stories together. I wrote a little bit about this last year, but this is the first time I feel like I’ve gotten the hang of it.

Albert and Michelle here. We’re thinking of you all during another chaotic and depressing news cycle. But today we write with a genuine sense of dread about Taiwan—one we have not felt in the four years since moving here. Usually, when people ask if things are okay (by which they mean: will China invade and World War III begin), we shrug it off and say Taiwan is a wonderful place to live.

But as some of you know better than we do, the U.S. is off the rails.

To begin, Michelle wrote a semi-viral post criticizing a truly terrible New York Times op-ed—one that, if adopted, signals a new isolationist turn on Taiwan in Washington, a radical break in American foreign policy:

Our friend Kerim Friedman (read his wonderful newsletter!), an anthropologist who teaches at Donghwa University in Taiwan, summed up the op-ed:

Taiwan: [exists]

Beijing: Stop provoking me!

Useful idiots writing in the Times: Yeah, stop that.

Why the dread? There’s no question in our mind that Trump would sell out Taiwan if he could make a deal with China. He has no personal relationship to Taiwan, no affection for it whatsoever, and obviously would be unmoved or outright dissuaded by the aspects of Taiwan that move you and me. These are the stories we’ve been sharing in our newsletter—from Taiwan’s rich religious diversity, to dissidents once jailed for activism who later became mayors; from women leaders to the hard-won victory for same-sex marriage. We also feel dread because we know Trump has a pet grievance about Taiwan “stealing” America’s semiconductor industry (we write about this history in our recent review of A Chip Odyssey), and he famously nurtures his grudges, acting out vengefully.

This op-ed is particularly alarming because its writer, Jennifer Kavanagh, works for a thinktank, Defense Priorities, funded by the Koch brothers, which advocates withdrawal from Ukraine. Among the op-ed’s many flaws is its portrayal of Taiwan as an “important factor in the spiral of destabilization.” This is an infuriating accusation for myriad reasons.

First, we’d like clarification from Kavanagh: can you name specifically what the Lai administration has done to “destabiliz[e]” the status quo? For sure, Lai has made strong statements in his speeches, but none even come close to a change in the status quo. His most radical policy changes have been almost exclusively at a domestic level, such as restoring military trials for espionage cases, expelling people who have advocated for the violent annexation of Taiwan, and expanding defense against cybersecurity threats. This has undoubtedly affected the everyday lives of individual Taiwanese citizens. But how, may we ask, has that disrupted the realm of international relations? How has Lai ever crossed any red lines when it comes to the tight rope of Taiwanese independence?

Historian’s Sidenote, a.k.a. totally unnecessary finger-wagging but we’re going to do it anyway: the claim that “Taiwan has been a thorn in U.S.-China relations ever since Communist forces took control of China in 1949” makes no historical sense. From 1949 to 1979, there were no U.S.-China relations to speak of without Taiwan at its center. The U.S. recognized the Republic of China, with its seat in Taipei, as the China. Taiwan only became a “thorn” once Washington switched recognition to Beijing.

What the writer likely means—and this is a basic, if common, error—is that Taiwanese independence activists have always been a thorn in the side for the governments in Beijing, Washington, and Taipei. (This is why we joke that we should move to Tainan and make it the capital.) In the past, all three governments joined in an unholy alliance to marginalize voices for Taiwanese sovereignty. It’s therefore unsurprising that the CCP, KMT, and the Republican party now have sought to resurrect this unholy alliance.

The argument that Taiwan has been driving destabilization also contradicts itself: on the one hand, China’s power is so overwhelming that the U.S. must avoid risking war; on the other, little Taiwan, which is so insignificant it’s not worth defending, is somehow so powerful that it’s driving all the destabilization. Which is it?

Three years ago, we wrote about the analytical failure of blaming a small country in the realm of international relations. We’ve lifted this piece behind the paywall (bonus: it contains words from the OG Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island) and quote from it here:

If the Americans and Chinese are headed towards war, is there anything in history that can teach us how to prevent it?

One of our favorite pieces on World War I is historian Paul Schroeder’s 1972 article “World War I as Galloping Gertie.” Schroeder asks the generations-old question of who was to blame for the war, replying to another historian, Joachim Remak, who argued that no one came out with their hands clean—neither the hotheaded Serbian nationalist who killed the heir to the Habsburg Empire nor the German Kaiser intent on playing power politics. On a deeper reading, though, it’s evident that Remak mostly blames the Serbians for upending the world with their nationalism.

But wait a minute, says Schroeder: that’s not how international relations work. Not every country is equally powerful, so not every country can be judged the same way. Small countries like Serbia have a very limited range of feasible military, diplomatic, and social responses to the global situation; big countries have far greater freedom to act.

Schroeder ultimately blames not Germany or Austria or Serbia, but the British Empire. Had the British been less ambiguous—had it backed up the tottering Habsburg Empire immediately after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—it could have kept the other Great Powers in check and maintained peace. Instead, it equivocated, refusing to make its intentions clear.

In cleaving to strategic ambiguity and preserving its freedom of action, the British waited too long. Other actors filled the gap with their aggression. As the global hegemon, Britain had a “greater ability to change the outcome,” Schroeder charges, but it abdicated this responsibility. The Habsburg Empire was on the verge of collapse and the British Empire “assisted in her destruction.”

We all know what happened in the ensuing years: the “system was bent and twisted until it broke; its burdens were distributed not according to ability to bear them, but inability to resist.”

*

Why did this op-ed bother us so much? Elsewhere, Kavanagh has been more nuanced, calling for “strategic ambiguity,” the fragile framework that has underpinned an uneasy peace in the Taiwan Strait. But this op-ed amounts to a radical shift in American foreign policy toward Taiwan. Essentially, she’s urging U.S. to scale back its presence, leaving Taiwan to face China alone—and, incredibly, she blames Taiwan for this shift in American policy.

More, she doesn’t even consider that retreat could cause disaster; as Jeremy Page has warned in The Economist, “Signaling weakness on Taiwan, for instance, has as much potential to trigger Chinese military action as being over-provocative.”

We get it. From a U.S. realist or anti-imperialist perspective, the American empire is overextended. But if you want to argue for isolationism, then at least be upfront about the real structural reasons driving this need for change. The reality is that America is a declining imperial power, increasingly unreliable to its allies, and it faces a radically revisionist Beijing that aims to replace it as a hegemon in the Pacific.

But this is what bothers us so much: instead of making a good-faith case for isolationism, Kavanagh parrots PRC talking points that cast Taiwan as the aggressor. It’s the PRC line, hook, line, and sinker—accusing Taiwan of upending the status quo when it is obvious who the real aggressor is. Beijing launches an estimated 2.4 million cyberattacks on Taiwan’s government every day; has severed undersea communication cables in Taiwan’s waters; has tried to build paramilitary groups on the island; and has bribed legislators, interfered in elections, and unleashed sprawling disinformation campaigns aiming to polarize and divide the Taiwanese people. To call Taiwan the aggressor is insulting and flatly untrue. Taiwan has been a peaceful and dutiful partner to the United States. And it’s done nothing but try its best to comply with U.S. policy. Washington and Beijing—not Taiwan—drive the “spiral of destabilization,” with voices like hers leading the charge.

As other commentators have observed (here and here), most of the China hawks in Trump 1.0—including those with expertise on China who have expressed support for Taiwan—have resigned, been fired, or resassigned. (There was also some continuity between Trump 1.0 and Biden on China, with personnel continuing from one administration to the next; that has also ended.) American neoconservatives who once regarded Taiwan as a place worth protecting no longer have as much power; instead, people like Donald Trump Jr., who advocates “America First” and has said that foreign policy would entail negotiating with China and avoiding “poking the dragon in the eye unnecessarily.”

It’s this radical departure from established foreign policy that worries us. In the past few days, while dropping off our five-year-old at school or stopping by the supermarket, we’ve pictured a future where China invades and occupies Taiwan, with friends of ours getting arrested and executed. Yes, China has a law that gives the death penalty to what they call “diehard separatists,” and friends of ours are on the P.R.C.’s official list.

Still, this may be a clarifying moment for Taiwan and all of us who hope fervently that it will remain free. Taiwan is indeed a bulwark against China, but it is far more than that. At its core, Taiwan represents an ongoing decolonizing struggle, a vibrant site of human flourishing, a nation that deserves recognition in any emerging global order. If the future is multipolar, then that order must make space for smaller countries like Taiwan—states that have already made, and can continue to make, outsized contributions. A truly multipolar world cannot simply recycle the old imperial carve-ups of the nineteenth century; it must be something new.

An Isolationist America is Very Bad for Taiwan

Last fall, we wrote an essay on how an isolationist America would affect Taiwan. We’re lifting it out from behind the paywall today and reprint an edited excerpt that seems particularly relevant today:

What will an increasingly isolationist United States mean to Taiwan? Most distressingly, a U. S. retreat gives China much more space to maneuver. With Trump at the helm, PRC officials can pretty legitimately claim the mantle of being the “adults in the room.” We believe that the Xi Jinping regime is at heart expansionist and revanchist, and it has clearly made the annexation (whether “peaceful” or not) of Taiwan central to its vision of its world-historical place in the world. An American retreat from the region would give Xi the space to claim the mantle of being the “good guy” in international arena. You know what that means: pro-Taiwan activists are going to be depicted as pesky, de-stabilizing, troublemakers. (Flashback to the Chen Shui-bian years!)

American isolationism will fuel domestic actors in Taiwan who have for years depicted pro-Taiwan voices as destabilizing. Already we see the Blue (pro-KMT and often pro-China) media taking the tack that the ruling DPP bet on the wrong horse by putting all of its eggs in the U.S. basket, because it did not “de-escalate” risk with China. This is false information; it’s China that has refused to talk to the DPP government.

In short, it seems pretty clear that for those who believe in Taiwanese independence and sovereignty, we’re in for some rough waters. We’ve felt the tide shift the past six months, and we don’t see it switching back any time soon.

And you’re probably wondering about the million dollar question: Does this mean China is going to invade Taiwan in the next four years? Maybe not, as signs indicate that China faces enough internal problems and challenges to its domestic legitimacy that it would be disastrous for them to launch a war. But China can do a lot to Taiwan without launching a war. It can continue to expand its gray zone operations and test the boundaries of the status quo. It can cut off Taiwan’s ability to navigate the sphere of international relations. It can use economic and geopolitical coercion to punish pro-Taiwan voices and allies. It can ramp up disinformation and media infiltration campaigns into Taiwan to intensify the polarization within a polarized country. An American retreat will only embolden these attempts.

Are there any silver linings—anything that gives us hope? Well, the United States for decades has clung to a somewhat hypocritical policy, commonly referred to as “strategic ambiguity.” Basically, they claim to support Taiwanese democracy and regard Taiwan as a partner, but they don’t recognize Taiwan’s claims to sovereignty and full membership in the international community. The Trump moment is crudely clarifying to Taiwanese people: So yes, you always just wanted us for our chips, and oh you’ll still take our money for arms sales. We knew all along you would sell us out. The blinders are off now.

The upside of everything being transactional is that it takes two to tango. It gives people in Taiwan the opportunity to think about why we’re valuable, what it is that we can offer to the world.

Some Links

• We highly recommend this conversation between Peter Slezkine and Sam Moyn if you want to hear more conversations about a multipolar world.

• We’re recently experimenting more with Substack Notes, which has matured into an interesting platform. Albert’s been posting his favorite bike routes in Taipei— introduced to him by the wonderful Michael Fahey, a longtime Taiwan resident, lawyer, and translator. The route passes through the largest Muslim cemetery in Taipei, as well as a memorial to victims of killed by the White Terror. Read more about 魏文賢, executed for printing leftist pamphlets and materials at the age of 23. His story is a reminder of Taiwan’s authoritarian past and the struggles that created its democratic, multi-layered present.

Book Club

We loved talking to you all about Patricia Engel’s Veins of the Ocean! Our next book club is Friday, October 24th 7 PM EST / Saturday, October 25th 7 AM Taiwan time. We’re going to read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo for the October book club. After, we’ll be reading Miranda July’s All Fours, Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett’s James, and Natalia Ginzburg’s Road to the City. The book club is open to all paying subscribers. Thanks to our book club members for their suggestions! Please reply to this email for a zoom link.

Michelle and Albert here. For this week we’re recommending two dazzling Taiwanese graphic novels.

One of the most distinctive features of Taiwanese graphic novels, comics, and children’s books is their sustained engagement with history. Taiwan is special in this way. Its storytellers are deeply interested in recovering, reworking, and rethinking the past. This has much to do with more than four decades of martial law, when stories were circulated underground, told in hushed tones. The years leading up to the lifting of martial law in 1987 were turbulent and hard-fought, and the victories unleashed a drive to tell one’s own story—along with a sharp awareness of how precious this freedom is.

The two books we want to highlight today wrestle with the long shadow of Japanese colonization. Both open with the image of American planes dropping bombs—an indelible memory for many Taiwanese of that generation. Both grapple with the shift from Japanese rule to the Kuomintang (KMT). Both se…

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Hello readers,

It’s Ghost Month in Taiwan, a time when the gates of the underworld open. In the Kuo-Wu household, we’re rather superstitious (or perhaps faithful?) about observing the rules of Ghost Month. So, for instance, we’ve avoided going to the beach—you’re not supposed to swim or even stand in the water; ghosts might carry you off.

Yesterday was the central point of Ghost Month: the 15th day of the seventh month in the Festival of Zhongyuan (中原節), also known here as Pudu (普渡). Today we republish a reader favorite: a piece that blends history and anthropology to look at Ghost Month.

If you’d like to learn more about Ghost Month and how some of its ethos inflects Taiwanese politics and history, check out Chris Horton’s wonderful Ghost Nation, which has just been released. Chris is among the most respected journalists on Taiwan, rooted here long before the international press paid it any attention. His knowledge and learning shines through in the book. We’re honored that his book quoted from this essay.

If you’re interested, here’s a clip that captures a major Zhongyuan festival parade in Hsinchu:

Who are the ghosts and what do they want?

In Taiwan, Ghost Month is the time when the gates of the underworld open, letting ghosts out to roam the world of the living.

All around the country you’ll see tables of offerings—temporary altars—that contain fruit, rice, snacks, cooked chicken, and beer. Often there are large cans of fire for burning paper money, with a towel and wash basin next to it. These altars are everywhere, from fancy high-rise buildings to tiny storefronts to construction sites. We’ve seen dentists, nurses, real estate agents, car mechanics, and laborers in hard hats lighting incense sticks and bowing their heads.

The rules of Ghost Month are at once whimsical and creepy:

1. Don’t borrow a stranger’s umbrella or an unclaimed one. Spirits reside under them and may follow you into your house.

2. Likewise, don’t bring your own umbrella into the house.

3. Don’t point slippers towards your bed. You might be welcoming ghosts into it.

4. Don’t call them “ghosts.” Refer to them as “good sisters” (好姐妹) or “good brothers” (好兄弟).

5. Don’t touch the towels or the water basin at the offering table: they’re for the ghosts to wash themselves or to wipe off sweat. (Michelle to Albert: “Ghosts sweat?”)

6. Don’t refer to yourself by your full name. They may hear it.

7. On Ghost Day, wear bright colors.

8. After you eat, don’t look back. They may follow you.

9. Don’t have a wedding. Ghosts may crash it.

10. At the offerings table, don’t provide certain kinds of fruit (pears, lychees, bananas).

11. Avoid whistling. Spirits are drawn to it.

12. Don’t stand under a tree or bus stop.

13. Don’t go swimming or stand in the water, as ghosts live there and may carry you off.

There are dozens more rules. These are just a taste.

*

By now you’re probably wondering: Who are these ghosts? What do they want?

We had the same questions. We could have asked the good brothers and sisters directly, but we were too cowardly. In this case oral history is not our preferred methodology. Instead, we immersed ourselves in some of the fascinating anthropological literature on ghost festivals, and learned that there are brave people—spirit mediums, local Buddhist or Daoist priests—who opt to make contact with ghosts. (More on this below!)

The key to understanding ghosts is that they were people who died in a nonconforming, shameful, idiosyncratic, or indecent way: by accident, suicide, disaster, in humiliating poverty, in a place without kin or friends. Anthropologist Robert Weller calls them “the improperly dead.”1

Fires, coal mine collapses, drownings, even deaths of scholars on the way to take the provincial or imperial exam—these all can make ghosts. Deaths where bones are irretrievable, such as deep lakes or far away lands, can too. Ghosts are the “marginal dead,” Weller writes, “with no descendants to worship them, indigents who cannot be identified.”

Their default descriptor is “hungry,” which tells us quite a bit. Deprived of basic sustenance, ghosts need human attention. They want to be fed and have nobody to feed them. But, as Weller writes, they’re not to be mistaken for “bandit gangs or beggar guilds,” because they’re asocial and without attachment. They’re “simply isolated individuals,” lost among the living.

It’s easy to confuse ghosts with the two other categories of spirits, ancestors and gods. The rituals appear similar: you make offerings, burn paper money, light incense, and bow your head in prayer. But the relationships and materials tend to differ. For instance, ghosts receive silver incense paper; ancestors and gods receive gold. As anthropologist Wei-Ping Lin observes, the goal with ghosts is to placate the good brothers and sisters in the hopes that they'll go away.2

With the ancestors and gods, in contrast, your aim is not to truncate your relationship but to continue it. The rituals also differ: ancestors are worshipped inside homes, gods in temples. Ghosts are “worshipped” outside.

*

Who are the ghosts roaming Taiwan today? Lin, who did her fieldwork in Wannian, a village north of Tainan, describes a mother and daughter who died in a thatched hut that caught fire. Nearby workers described “footsteps of the mother and daughter walking back and forth through the field.” They heard occasional screaming as well. Villagers raised money to build a three-walled building for the mother and daughter and a shrine for offerings, so they’d have a place to rest and eat. But this failed to satisfy the ghosts. Villagers tell stories of strange occurrences near the place of death: plows suddenly breaking down, a mysterious cold wind striking, a person falling ill immediately after.

But ghosts don’t exist merely to be feared. They’re also manipulated—and, apparently, consulted for lottery numbers. Lin attended several events where “chair holders”—the equivalent of a spirit medium—make contact with the ghosts. When they start to shake violently, it’s a sign that the ghost will come. She continues:

The villagers told me that when a ghost approaches, people feel a chill descend upon them, and sometimes a fishy odor (in contrast to the warm and pleasant fragrance when deities come). Ghosts can be quite unpredictable during a possession. For instance, it is said that once a ghost refused to leave the bodies of the chair holders after the consultation. Therefore, this kind of event always involves some risk, showing the extraordinary courage of the chair holders in allowing ghosts to possess their bodies.

The consultation involves some negotiating: if the lottery numbers turn out to be winners, how many offerings should the villagers prepare in recompense?

Confusingly, these lines can also get blurred. Ghosts can become gods; ghosts can also become part of your ancestry. Consider a “spirit marriage: often these involve a woman who dies in childhood and haunts her family. The family might persuade, bribe, or deceive a man to marry her ghost. Once married, she has her name entered into the ancestral tablet, thereby gaining a place to reside. The man is also free to marry another person. (Don’t ask us how this works, we’re still investigating.)

*

In Taiwan, every government—the Qing dynasty, the Japanese colonial regime, and the Kuomintang (KMT)—detested the ghost festival, resenting the power it held over people. These successive states, recognizing that the ritual expressed an ideological critique of the state’s inability to care for the poor and marginal, struggled—and failed—to banish ghost rituals, deeming them by turns antirational, superstitious, exploitative of people’s incomes, or anti-modern.

In the Qing period, as Weller writes, local elites would donate food to temples for Ghost Month. Actual beggars and other vulnerable people would thus emerge from invisibility. Put more simply, hungry people became public. You can see why the state felt threatened: the large numbers of impoverished people exposed the extent of its failures.

The state also feared mass revolt. For decades from 1890 to 1930, the festival could become quite violent. The backstory here is one of capitalism, migration from China, and encroachment on indigenous land. Migrant workers from southern China came to work in Taiwan’s booming camphor industry, competing for jobs in forests on mountain land where indigenous groups lived. The work was dangerous, in part because they had to fight those indigenous groups who sought to protect their land and trees from ravage.

In a sort of Squid-Game-Meets-Lord-of-the-Flies mashup, marginalized people fought for the food in a ritual called “robbing the lonely ghosts.” Weller notes that organizers placed “immense quantities of food” at the top of an elevated altar that reached up to sixty feet, made of “bamboo poles” structured like “cones that stretched from five to ten feet in diameter at the base.” In certain instances, as many as forty thousand beggars, workers, and other competitors would gather. After the ceremony, they’d climb to the top of the pole, jousting for the food. The “whole scene was one mass of arms and legs and tongues,” wrote a Presbyterian missionary in 1895. “Screaming, cursing, howling, like demons of the pit, they all joined in the onset. It was a very bedlam, and the wildness of the scene was enhanced by the irregular explosion of firecrackers and the death-groan of some one worsted in the fray.”

Roughly a generation later, a Japanese anthropologist in the 1920s made a similar observation:

The robbing of the lonely ghosts took place at 6:30 p.m., and the start was signaled by a puff of smoke, when everyone began their enthusiastic plunder. The sounds of assault and murder pierced heaven. . . . Hordes of people began to climb the lonely ghost platform, each anxious to stay ahead of the others. . . . The lonely ghost platform was covered with people, each enthusiastically stealing the offerings, pushing and screaming, and robbing each other. They say that with the ghosts’ protection they will not be hurt, but in fact large numbers are always hurt and killed.

If the ghosts were so dangerous, why weren’t people afraid to steal their food?

There’s a simple answer to this: they were! That’s why you had to be quick and athletic, scaling the altar with alacrity. But we wonder—and this is pure speculation—whether the people identified so much with the hungry ghosts that the ghosts stopped seeming dangerous or foreign. Put another way, the hungry ghosts appeared exactly as secularists would see them: desperate, lonely figures created in our human image. The ritual itself consolidated that identification. People self-consciously took on the guise of ghosts, demanding to be fed.

The Qing state was weak and unable to assert control; the Japanese state, much more centralized and powerful, managed to send troops and repress the melees. But it wasn’t able to ban the rituals outright. Instead, by the 1930s, the rituals had transformed into explicit athletic competitions, a tradition that continues today. At the Hengchun “Ghost Grappling Festival” (中元搶孤), teams compete to climb up poles covered with tar. This year, the winning team took home 350,000 NTD (roughly 10,000 USD).

Like the Japanese colonial government, the KMT was unable to control the religious festivals. They had perhaps learned their lesson in China; as historian Rebecca Nedostup writes, the early KMT regime issued an outright ban in 1934, "making the Ghost Festival the only festival universally targeted by name."3

By the time the KMT occupied Taiwan, its goals had also changed: it wanted to distinguish itself from the PRC by claiming that it promoted freedom of religion. In the 1950s it permitted Ghost Month but sought to change the symbolic meaning of the rituals, depicting them as proof of economic prosperity and the rising wealth of society. More sweepingly, as Weller has argued, the past 150 years or so have seen a transformation of ghosts from considered dangerous to being considered pitiful.

More recently, the government has promoted Ghost Month festivals as an essential part of Taiwanese popular religious culture, as well as an entertaining attraction for tourists. Today, one of the most vibrant festivals can be found in Huwei, Yunlin, where Alan Yang’s gorgeous film Tigertail partly takes place. (Huwei is the hometown of Yang’s parents.) Huwei’s annual Ghost Month festival boasts thousands of tables of ritual objects, ice sculptures, and dancing robots. (You read that right: ice sculptures in the heat and humidity of Taiwan in August.)

In Keelung, a port city north of Taipei, people today still observe the tradition of burning “water lanterns” for those who have drowned at sea. The lonely ghosts are invited to eat on land, and then the burning boats lead them back out into the water. The emphasis is on pity for the poor and the drowned. As historian Evan Dawley observes, for more than 150 years the Ghost Festival “strengthened a sense of community” in the city.4

Meanwhile, in 2022, tragic news came out of Taoyuan. About twenty people were paying their respects to ghosts, standing in the water with hands joined and pushing rafts of offerings into the ocean, when a sudden tide dragged three people to their deaths. Here in the Kuo-Wu household—admittedly prone to superstitious beliefs—these deaths were quite disturbing, a reminder that, however sanitized contemporary rituals are, an element of danger persists and endures.

Ghost Month is often depicted as a quirky custom, a holdover from the past. But we’ve thought a lot while writing this piece about how ghosts reflect our relationship to those who live on the margins of society. Fundamentally, these rituals show respect to those whom we’ve abandoned. How do we fold them into an ethic of care, into a structure of compassionate? Ghost Month points to an answer. Feed them. Worship them. Acknowledge their pain. Give them humane ways to wash themselves. Call them brothers and sisters.

These rituals show the hope and limits of human aspiration, revealing our empathy as well as our hypocrisy. We provide food for these abandoned others but don’t welcome them into our homes. We call them brothers and sisters but hope they go away. We pay our respects for one month of the year but banish them for the rest.

Book Club: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

We loved talking to you all about Patricia Engel’s Veins of the Ocean! Our next book club is Friday, October 24th 7 PM EST / Saturday, October 25th 7 AM Taiwan time. We’re going to read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo for the October book club. After, we’ll be reading Miranda July’s All Fours, Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Percival Everett’s James. The book club is open to all paying subscribers. Thanks to our book club members for their suggestions!

This book is a model of meticulous research, remarkable for the breadth of its geographical and chronological sweep. Beginning in the seventeenth century with Tejonihokarawa, the Mohawk leader who travelled to London, and culminating in the twentieth century with George Manuel, the Indigenous Canadian activist, it spans more than three hundred years…

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We’re really sorry about being absent for so long. To be completely honest, we’ve gone through a rough patch. Meanwhile, we've had ideas about what to write, but whenever we face the page, we’ve had major writer’s block. The news cycle has left us feeling powerless and confused, on the border of despair. What is there to say? We have no hot takes, no clear-eyed vision for the future. The starvation in Gaza, the masked men abducting immigrants in the United States, the innocents left to die in immigration prisons in Florida, El Salvador, the corruption, the dehumanization of immigrants, the cruelty of Big Powers…it’s all pretty unbearable, and we have to fight to remain open to hope rather being desensitized.

And of course, who are we to feel hopeless? People in less privileged positions than us continue to fight because they have no choice. Our own problems feel very minor. We’ve been feeling ashamed about not being in the U.S. to protest, canvas, and protect our undocumented …

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Michelle and Albert here. We just finished a semester of teaching, phew! I taught two courses this semester, one on creative expression, at a women’s juvenile detention center in Taipei and the other, on storytelling and the law, at National Chengchi University, where I teach at the International College of Innovation. (I hope to write about the former, but I need to sort out my thoughts about it.) Albert taught a course called “Radical European Thought,” which was basically a modern intellectual history class. (“It was a mistake to end on Freud,” he told me, shaking his head sadly, when he came home from the last day of the semester. “Freud’s too pessimistic.”) We have been thinking a lot about Freud and how his insights take on a new resonance in middle …

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